Hello there everyone. I hope we all had a great weekend. I know it was nice for those of us who still enjoy a good snowstorm, though it did make getting to work on Monday a bit interesting. Let’s get on with this week’s update.

The February event A Change in Tactics is going live this week. As always, we are very excited about this event, and we hope you are as well. All worlds will be down today, Wednesday the 15th, from 9am EST to 3pm EST. That downtime will be a bit longer for the Darktide server so that we can get the promised Hardwar upgrade done for them. Darktide will be down until 5pm EST. We may not need it to be down for that long, but we want to be sure of things before we bring the world back up.

I wanted to take this opportunity to address the recent concerns with language and other CoC violations that have been brought up a lot recently. We have heard you, and we share your concern with the situation. We will be working together with customer service in the coming weeks and months to help improve the way some situations are handled. One of the things we are working on that is related to this is a language filter. This is the first step to help our players as well as helping our support staff with the amount of language calls we receive. The language filter will help in making it so that players who don’t want to read the language, won’t have to. The language filter is not a replacement for enforcement, but it will help allow players who don’t want to be exposed to bad language in the interim. We still want to stop the offending players, and will continue to try and do so, but in the meantime the language filter will certainly help. As always we will be continuing to enforce the CoC and trying to remove those players who feel they are above the rules of the game.

The last thing I will talk about in this post is what we are doing this week, other than shoveling snow. During this week, the final version of the February event is given the ok to be pushed out. QA and Crowley give the OK, and the event is sent to our Ops team so they can prepare the event to get out to everyone. Along with this work, the team is already heavily into the content for March. Finishing up designs and ideas, as well as making sure that the goals we have set for ourselves are met.

That is it for this update. We hope you all have a great week.
__________________
Andy "Frelorn" Cataldo
AC Community Relations
Turbine, Inc

New Technical Support System - 2/22/06 (by Frelorn)

We are very pleased to announce that Turbine is moving from a phone based technical support system to an internet chat technical support system. This new system will help us answer your questions faster and more efficiently. Your questions can be answered more quickly and you won’t have to wait in a phone queue. Internet chat technical support is used by many companies and we’re very excited to bring this to our players. It’s also much easier to send us information such as files by simply copying and pasting into the chat window.

To access the chat and get technical support help, click here.
__________________
Andy "Frelorn" Cataldo
AC Community Relations
Turbine, Inc

Weekly Update - 2/23/06 (by Frelorn)

Hi there everyone.

I wanted to start off this week’s update with a heart felt thank you. We know that this week has been one that a lot of us would like to just forget, and that many of you feel very strongly that we are not handling the recent downtimes in a correct manner. All I can say is that we are doing all that we can to keep the downtimes to a minimum. When dealing with billing systems that contain as much valuable information as ours does, you need to be extremely careful. If that means having to bring things down several times to make sure things are kept safe, then it is something we will not hesitate to do. We would rather be sure that all the information is safe, than taking a risk just to keep things up a bit longer. I know that some people are asking for the exact details of what has been done that would require us to have things up and down like this, and to be totally honest, most of it is way over my head. What I do know is that everything that was and is being done is to improve not only the performance of the billing and authentication system, but to also make things easier for you, our customers and our own billing staff. So once again thank you for being patient with us while we work through these changes to the billing system.

Moving forward we have some exciting things going in for the March event. I won’t give out too much information right now, but what I will say is that the world of PvP is in for some rather interesting changes. While not getting into the numbers on the changes, I will say that not only are there going to be some damage increases on Weeping Weapons, there will be more improvements on Phantom and Hollow weapons. Not to mention the continued changes that will be made to help loot weapons become more viable in PvP. All the changes we are making are based on the feedback we got from you, the PvP community. The feedback that we have gotten so far has been great, and we hope to be able to continue that dialog going forward. As we get closer to the March event, we will post more on these changes.

This week is implementation and testing for March. This is when the team gets all of the quests into the game and begin the testing process. We will play through the quests, looking for any errors or oddities that nay cause a problem. This is also the time we look at the balance of these quests to make sure they are in line with our goals.

Thank you all very much and have a great day.
__________________
Andy "Frelorn" Cataldo
AC Community Relations
Turbine, Inc
 

Weekly Update - 2/27/06 (by Frelorn)

Hello there everyone. I do hope we all had a great weekend.

Not too long ago we made some changes to the Temples of Enlightenment and Forgetfulness. While we feel that these changes were a step in the right direction, there was room to make some changes. Coming in the March update we have made some tweaks to this system. When you log in after the March update, all players will have their temple timers reset. This means that once again you will be able to make those changes that some of you could not complete before. The first change that has been made is the splitting of the attribute timers. After the first round of changes were made you could pick up 18 attribute tokens, either attributes up or down. This system caused some confusion among some of the players, and some people picked up 18 tokens of raise or lower attributes, thinking they could pick up 18 more of the opposite tokens. For the March event, we have separated the timers on the attribute tokens, so that players will now be able to only pick up 9 of each type of attribute token.

Another change that is being made is the ability to correct mistakes once inside the temples. I can remember from my days in customer service, players putting in calls saying they had accidentally picked up the wrong gems. In the March event this will no longer be a problem. If for whatever reason a player picks up the wrong token, they can simply turn that token in to an NPC, and they will then be able to pick up another. This way, those mistakes will no longer be an issue. We have also made sure that the books in the temples have been updated to reflect all of the changes to the system.

This week the team will continue to check out the things going in for the March event. This includes any bugfixes or content revision that may have been suggested after testing. This is one of those weeks where a little bit of everything is being done in preparation for the March event.

I would also like to put out a warning/reminder that with the official launch of DDO this week, we may experience some slowness on the forums. There are a lot of people trying to access our websites and other resources this week, and while we do not foresee any issues with this, we will be monitoring the site for anything that may arise.

That’s it for this week. Everyone have a great day, and good hunting.
__________________
Andy "Frelorn" Cataldo
AC Community Relations
Turbine, Inc

Weekly Update - 3/6/06 (by Frelorn)

Hi there everyone. I hope that everybody had a great weekend.

Let’s get right into this week’s update.

This week we are doing the final run-throughs for the March update. We are making sure quest difficulties are where we want them and fixing any issues that may have come up in testing. We also have begun the process of ramping up the content for the April event. Doing quest write-ups, making sure the mechanics of the game allow us to do what we want to, throwing ideas back and forth and brainstorming the things we want to do. This tends to be some of the most fun we have. Throwing ideas at each other, which sometimes leads to some of the silliest ideas you might ever hear. I won’t get into details about some of these ideas, but let’s just say you would all be glad they end at being ideas, and don’t actually make it into the game.

Normally in these updates I would be giving you some information about what is coming in the next update, which in case you were wondering is on Wednesday March 15th, and is named Down Twisting Paths. Instead of giving you more information about what is coming in the March event, I thought we could do something different. I want to know what the one thing in AC stands out the most to you as a player. What is that one quest, that one piece of content that makes you sit back and think what a great idea this was?

I have 2 motives for this question, the first being that we can take the feedback from this and use it to help us make things you all feel are more fun. The other motive for this question is to help break up a lot of the negativity that has been floating in the air lately. What better way to do that than to list your favorite thing about Asheron’s Call. When you think of all the fun you have had playing, what is the first thing that stands out in your mind? I know for me it has to be doing the Sword of Lost Light quest for the first time. I can remember my future wife yelling at me to go to bed as it was well past 1am on a weekday, and I had to be to work at 6am. If I recall right, I didn’t actually make it to bed that night, though I did get my sword.

That’s about it. The LttP is going to be out on this upcoming Friday, the 10th. We will as always keep you informed if there are any changes to this schedule. Everyone have a great day!
__________________
Andy "Frelorn" Cataldo
AC Community Relations
Turbine, Inc

Billing Support Hours Extended - 3/10/06 (by Frelorn)

The hours of operation for our billing support staff has been extended until further notice. The new hours of operation will be from 10am EST - 12am EST.
__________________
Andy "Frelorn" Cataldo
AC Community Relations
Turbine, Inc

Weekly Update - 3/13/06 (by Frelorn)

Hi there. Welcome to this weeks update. Let’s get right into it, as this is going to be a busy week.

In case anyone forgot, this is event week. The March event, Down Twisting Paths will be going live on Wednesday, and we are excited about all of the new things going on in Dereth. As with all of our events, we are looking forward to player feedback on the things we have been able to implement this month.

This week I have decided to answer a couple of the bigger questions that have been asked here on the forums.

Will there ever be characters classes who are “tinkerers” or “mule” type characters that can be made special from creation?
As of right now no, however in Dereth we never say never. The tech for making special mule characters is not really in place at the moment. Though it would be nice for something like this, it is not on the radar at the moment, as the team is more focused on more in-game things.

You keep telling us that CD keys will be available soon. When is soon?
Unfortunately as of right now I cannot give you a solid date, I wish I could but there are several factors that come into play when getting this done. The first issue is compatibility. In order to do this one of the first things we needed to do was make a new installer. This new game installer will allow everyone to download the latest version of the game. This will include users of the new Windows OS. Now in order to make sure that these systems all work we need to test the installer several times under many different circumstances. This takes some time to complete.

The next thing we have to do is generate the CD keys themselves and make sure they work with our billing system. After that is done the system for distributing the keys must be tested and retested to make sure that everything is working correctly. After that is done then the secure page for these transactions must be made. After all of that is completed, we test everything again, just to be sure. Then we will be able to release the keys for everyone to purchase and use. This is not a process we are going to rush into without taking the needed steps to make sure everything is secure and working correctly.

That all being said, we are very close to having all of this completed, and as soon as I have a concrete date for when the sales will begin, I will make sure to have announcements everywhere we can put them. On a side note about this, as many have posted, the Turbine store recently ran out of stock of ToD. An order has been placed recently and more copies will be in stock within a week or so. Once the stock has been refilled, all orders will be sent out.

When will we see more live events?
Soon. We have some live events ideas in the works right now. I would like to add that based on feedback from previous events, we will be doing these events 2 ways. One will be a set of scheduled events. The schedule for these events will be posted for everyone to see so players can plan to participate. We will also be running these same types of events randomly, for those who want more of a surprise feel. The decision to do things this way was solely based on the feedback we got from you, the players. This new way of doing things will hopefully allow everyone who wants to participate, the ability to do so. We are looking forward to these events, and as we get closer to them, we will post the schedule.

What’s going on this week?
This week the team has shifted its focus from the March event, and has moved on to April. We have just about completed the testing for March, though QA will still be checking things out until the event goes live. This is the time the team concentrates on getting everything they want to do for April documented and ready to be placed in our internal test world.

That’s about it for this week. We are all excited about the upcoming event, and we look forward to your feedback. Everyone have a great day, and see you in Dereth!
__________________
Andy "Frelorn" Cataldo
AC Community Relations
Turbine, Inc